Next Wave of Electric Cars: Hybrids

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: May 14, 1996

WASHINGTON, May 12—
A motley collection of electric and hybrid vehicles will buzz, whirr and hum their way over 64 miles from Chesapeake to Annapolis in Maryland on Tuesday, about 50 in all, depending on how many have run out of juice, shorted out a component or otherwise broken down along the way in the eighth American Tour de Sol race, which began in New York City and will end here on Thursday.

The cars in the race are better than they ever have been. For many of the vehicles, the minimum demand of the race, up to 71.4 miles a day over a mixed city, suburban and interstate route, is hardly a challenge. The leading entry hopes to go 300 miles on a single charge, farther than many conventional cars go on a tank of gas.

By coincidence, the competitors in the annual race, a seven-day road rally for electric and hybrid vehicles, are heading for a finish line between the Capitol and the White House as President Clinton and Congress are maneuvering about whether to cut the gasoline tax by 4.3 cents a gallon. The best of the electrics have an energy cost of less than 2 cents a mile, compared with about 5 cents a mile for a typical car at current gas prices.

Electric cars have seemed for years to be over the horizon, or maybe the rainbow. Now they are, in fact, around the corner. General Motors will begin leasing a zippy two-seater electric, the EV1, through its Saturn dealerships in California and Arizona later this year. Chrysler will market the Epic, a five-passenger minivan based on the Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan, and Ford will market an electric version of the Explorer, converted by an independent contractor.

Toyota announced last month that it would sell an electric sport-utility vehicle in the second half of 1997, and Honda said it would lease an electric four-passenger car in the spring of 1997 that like G.M.'s entry, is built from the ground up, not adapted from a gasoline design.

Behind the first wave of mass-manufactured electrics are models with far better batteries -- promised soon by Japanese manufacturers. Beyond that is a second wave of technology, demonstrated in force in the Tour de Sol this year: hybrids, combining the best features of electrics and internal combustion engines. No major company has announced a plan to sell one commercially, but engineers say they could open up a new realm of choices for consumers who want fuel economy, environmental satisfaction or maybe even old-fashioned car virtues like faster acceleration and better handling.

The road that electric car development has taken to get to this point has had its share of political potholes.

For years, electric car research had been pushed by California, which had planned since the early 90's to require that 2 percent of the cars sold in that state in the 1998 model year produce "zero emissions," which would mean electric cars. New York and Massachusetts adopted the same rules. But in March, under heavy lobbying from the auto and oil industries, California backed off, settling instead for an expanded pilot program.

But as the auto industry's lobbyists have been fighting off the requirement, its engineers have been putting prototypes on the roads. Whether electric cars can be priced competitively has still to be demonstrated, but technological competition from amateurs and from start-up companies has made it hard for the Big Three to claim that they are being asked for the impossible.

One major change in this year's race is that not all the entrants are purely electric. Many of the cars, covered with bold stickers advertising university and high school teams and corporate sponsors, are hybrids that have small internal combustion engines, some borrowed from motorcycles and others from even less likely sources. In some hybrids, the engines turn the wheels directly; in others, they charge the batteries or make current for electric motors. In either case, they provide extra horsepower for acceleration and hills, allowing them to perform like sports cars.

More and more engineers with experience in hybrids -- including some at Ford, G.M. and Chrysler -- argue that hybrid vehicles can include the strengths of both electric and internal combustion drives. Like an electric, a hybrid can be built to use no energy at idle and to re-capture energy when it decelerates, by letting the car's momentum turn the wheels, which drive the motors, briefly turning them into generators that produce a current to flow into the battery. As a result, hybrids can get 40 or 50 miles for the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline or even more.

And hybrids can use liquid or gaseous fuels that pack a large amount of energy into a small package, as conventional cars do. In addition, marrying the two -- made easier in recent years by advances in power electronic circuitry, the circuitry that allows large amounts of electric power to be handled precisely -- allows the internal combustion engine to keep running in a steady, narrow range where it gets the most efficiency and runs the cleanest.

It also permits a smaller internal combustion engine because it no longer has to perform solo in the hardest job: accelerating thousands of pounds of mass from a standstill to highway speeds in a few seconds. A hybrid can get acceleration help from an electric motor.

The Pentagon is a big backer of hybrid research and development because battlefield vehicles running on electricity would be hard for an enemy to hear or to find with heat-seeking weapons. If those vehicles carried diesel engines to recharge the batteries, their range could be very long, and less fuel would have to be delivered to the battle zone.

Although conventional cars meet consumers' needs and expectations, they contribute heavily to air pollution, getting, on average, 27.5 miles per gallon, as optimistically measured by the Environmental Protection Agency.

A major cooperative research project between the Big Three auto makers and the Federal Government, the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicle, seeks to do the same work more cleanly, with three times the fuel efficiency. That will require something different.

"It seems like every major auto manufacturer has come to the conclusion that if we're able to market a vehicle that will meet what consumers want from their vehicles -- in comfort level, performance, range and things like that -- the only way you're going to be able to do that is with a hybrid," said Robert P. Larsen, manager of the technology engineering section at the Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Transportation Research, part of the Department of Energy. In related contracts, some of which predate the partnership, Ford, G.M. and Chrysler are each scheduled to deliver hybrids to the Energy Department in about two years.

One of the most important elements of an electric car, or a hybrid, is the battery. In the electric cars scheduled to come to market soon, Toyota and Honda plan to use nickel metal-hydride batteries, the kind that now dominate the laptop computer market. Most of the others are planning to use lead-acid batteries, but they have shown strong interest in nickel metal-hydride or other advanced technologies. Experts assume that before electric cars become popular, they will have batteries that store far more watts per kilogram of battery weight than lead-acid batteries can.

For the hybrids, other major questions remaining to be solved include how to yoke together electric and internal combustion systems.

One method is the series hybrid, like the University of Texas in El Paso's entry in the Tour de Sol, the HY!BRID, which has a Dodge Neon body with a 150-kilowatt (200-horsepower) electric motor and an old engine from a Geo converted to run on natural gas at a constant 3,000 revolutions per minute.

Prof. Carroll Johnson, the team's faculty adviser, sees the vehicle as a prototype for buses, which start and stop frequently and could benefit from having electric motors to capture the energy in stopping and to save wear and tear on the brakes, a major expense in heavy vehicles. A hybrid bus, he said, could do without its 3,000-pound diesel engine and run instead on two 100-pound electric motors and an engine like those in much smaller vehicles, like three-quarter-ton pickups, which weigh about 800 pounds. The hybrid would need a 400-pound generator, but it would not need a transmission.

But Prof. Michael R. Seal, adviser to the team from Western Washington University, in Bellingham, said that people who started by building a series hybrid usually tried a parallel hybrid next, like the ones his team is entering. In a parallel hybrid, the internal combustion engine and the electric motor pull together when the driver pushes down hard on the accelerator, but in the series hybrid, he pointed out, the engine runs independently of the driver, according to how the vehicle's control unit decides it should run.

"It's a most unpleasant thing," Professor Seal said. "We're not used to engines screaming away wide open, particularly when we're sitting at a stoplight, and that will happen because it's got to catch up from its last acceleration."

Chrysler, which has donated car bodies and travel expenses for nine hybrid teams, is showing off one design of its own, although it is not far enough along to run on public roads. Chrysler's Dodge Intrepid ESX carries batteries, a control unit and two 100-horsepower electric motors under the hood, with a 75-horsepower, 3-cylinder diesel engine in the rear. The batteries are lead-acid, but instead of the flat plates used in conventional car batteries, these have been wound into spirals with much greater surface area.

A conventional lead-acid battery is a little like a jug of wine; it may hold a lot but its narrow neck means that it can deliver what it has only slowly. The spiral battery is more like a peanut-butter jar; the volume is small but it can be filled or emptied quickly, which is exactly the load-leveling job that is required for fast starts or to accept current back from the motors in deceleration. Engineers refer to the quantity of electricity stored per kilogram of battery as the energy density; the speed of delivery is called the power density.

The relatively small diesel runs between 2,000 and 2,600 revolutions per minute, its "sweet spot" where it gets the best fuel efficiency, and therefore has good energy density. But Chrysler and others are also looking into fuel cells, devices that make current by combining hydrogen carried on board with oxygen from the air. These have poor power density, working well only at a steady state. That makes them unsuitable to run a car alone, but they have excellent energy density. To balance that weakness, several companies are working on flywheels, which could be spun up quickly to capture the excess energy during deceleration or quickly tapped for their mechanical energy.

But driving the ESX is a bit odd. As Professor Seal predicts, the car moves on electricity when the driver presses the accelerator pedal, but the diesel starts up when it wants to, which can be disconcerting.

Among the pure electrics in the Tour de Sol, the favorite for the distance prize -- and perhaps the efficiency prize, too -- is the Sunrise, a four-passenger sedan with an all-composite body designed around its nickel metal-hydride batteries, built by the Solectria Corporation of Arlington, Mass. Last year, it set a record at 238 miles, but this year, it has improved batteries and Solectria's president, James D. Worden, is hoping for 300. Before the Sunrise, which Solectria built with grants from the Pentagon and other government and private sources, Mr. Worden also set the distance record in 1993, with a converted Geo Metro that went 214 miles.

According to Solectria, interest in electric cars is quickening because of the plans by G.M., Ford and Chrysler. Solectria says that it has sold 215 vehicles since 1991 -- converted Geo Metro's or Chevy S-10 pickups -- but that it might sell 100 this year alone. A spokesman, Mark L. Dockser, said that "the market has become more real" because of the interest by the Big Three auto makers.

Solectria would like to sell the Sunrise and says it could do so for $25,000 each if it could sell 20,000 a year. But at least for the near future, the company is a tiny converter, not a mass manufacturer. Still, advocates say that the Tour de Sol leads by example.

Photos: Above, the new Chrysler Dodge Intrepid ESX car, with bothelectric and diesel engines, on exhibition last week at Union Station in Washington. (David Scull/The New York Times); Below, the Solectria Sunrise, a purely electric car, which now holds the distance record, at South Street Seaport in Manhattan; improved batteries may extend its range to 300 miles. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times)(pg. C8) Diagram: "Improving on a Good Thing" shows the mechanics of the parellel hybrid vehicle and the series hybrid vehicle. (Source: Ford Motor Company)